Almost a million protestors in Israel against the war today
A minimum of 300 thousand in Tel Aviv alone, probably closer to 500 thousand
300 thousand Israelis is a little over 3 percent of the Israeli population; if there was an American protest of that magnitude today that would be almost 11 million protestors
Almost a million protestors is 10% of the population, which would be 34.2 million Americans protestors
This is unprecedented
If y'all would just listen to what the actual Israelis want, you'd understand that WE WANT THIS WAR TO END
I know that there are people who will hate Israelis no matter what, but if you claim that this has nothing to do with sympathy for Gaza PBS says otherwise:
Plenty of people ignoring this last addition in the reblogs, while also not understanding anything about the Israeli population or the fact that people who are against this war are on your side
People who want this to end ARE ON YOUR SIDE
And if it's because the cost of the war is too great or because of the hostages, they still want the war to end
But plenty of people ARE talking about the Gazan lives being lost; about the fact that a war with no justified objective is murder
These are conversations happening in public, it's just that you cherry-pick right wing media to look at (channel 14 is literally worse than fox news, it's just a mouthpiece for Bibi) and ignore the fact that the media isn't the people
How about you listen to the people for once
Because this is a government we want gone and a war we want to end
And if that's not good enough for you, if you're not willing to support a mass movement to end the thing you want over, you're morally repugnant
[edit: corrected the order]
Full transcript below the readmore
Today my heart is breaking.
My heart is breaking because I love my country and I love my people and I will give and have given anything for them, but I also love the truth, and today the truth comes to collect.
I served 262 days in this war, until I was prevented from serving more. I watched my career, my family, and my mental health disintegrate on the pyre of our nation's freedom and security. I believe that in that time a lot of good was done. We saved a lot of people. It was worth the sacrifice.
But in the time that has elapsed between another mobilization, and another and another, my carefully cultivated walls of disbelief have eroded, and at a time when there is nothing left to lose, I am forced to ask: while we were fighting, what was our government doing? What were they fighting for?
Who was screaming "traitor" at the families of the hostages in the Knesset subcommittees while I was digging for bone fragments in Kissufim?
Who was holding lavish live-streamed conferences promising cheap real-estate in Gaza to settlers while I was scrubbing the blood off a truck bed and putting a kippa and a vape pen in a plastic bag for someone's mother to bury?
Who was blocking every chance of discussion about the objectives of this war and dodging interviews while I shivered on a rooftop in Syria behind my rifle?
When the world was screaming "Genocide!" and I dug in my heels and defended the virtue of our cause to anyone who would listen, who was planning the construction of transfer camps and negotiating with third-party countries to displace a civilian population of over 1.6 million people?
Who waved a flag in my face and told me I need to go save the hostages, while condemning them to die in security cabinet meetings?
My heart is breaking because I am given an impossible choice: I am told that to protect my people, I must participate in what has gradually and inescapably turned from a rescue operation into all but willful murder. To save the hostages, I must let them die. I am told that I must cheer for my government as it sends my comrades to their deaths and issues orders that horrify me. I am told that if I love my people, I must ignore the suffering of children being punished for the crimes of their parents, and pretend I believe in a lie so porous it no longer serves the purpose of even plausible deniability. I am breaking because I have already lost all I had to lose, and I know I will lose more by even posting this, but the truth is vengeful and vindictive and will come for me later if not today, so I choose today.
My heart is breaking because the truth is inescapable: A war without objectives is murder. A war without a cause is murder. And our government has abandoned the just objectives and causes that we went to fight for, and now requests our participation in murder. It doesn't matter if you think they deserve it. It doesn't matter if they do. I signed up to defend my country. I never signed up to be your executioner.
It's not too late to extract ourselves from this situation. There are still hostages that can be saved. There is still time to sit with our regional allies and find a long-term solution to Gaza that will result in a lasting peace with our neighbors, and not ethnic cleansing. It can happen. But it is not the intent of our government, and the only thing that will compel them to such action is the overwhelming surge of our broken voices screaming ENOUGH.
Today my heart is breaking, but it will be whole again one day, if we will it. If we don't ignore it.
Enough.
[attached is also a picture of a man in a bicycle helmet next to an e-scooter.]
One Heart Volunteer Team Drop of Life Water Campaign
Dahnoun Mutual Aid
Mawasi al-Qarara Mutual Aid
The Sameer Project for North Gaza Aid
Sameer Project's South Gaza Aid
Medical Campaign x Sameer Project
Team Hussain's Grassroots Aid Campaign
The Mohammed Project's Aid Campaign
Abu Hureirah Aid Network for Sudan and Palestine
Ihyaa's Mission for Students in Gaza
Official Gaza City Water Fund
Official Gaza City Campaign for Prosthetic Limbs for the Children of Gaza
Emergency Water Relief for Gaza City
Water Fund for Khan Younis Camp
Revive Gaza's Farmland Initiative
Ihyaa Initiative: Support Students in Gaza
People's Front For The Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Fundraiser
Lifeline4Gaza - vetted family fundraisers
Donate to direct action and gaza municipality and watch your money go to the best cause - if we can be anything we should be efficient. The most effective money you can give is to direct action, to group movements to protect our insurgents from adventurism, to Gazan medical tent for emergency medical relief, to providing water and food for Gaza through grassroots campaigns such as the PFLP's and mutual aid projects, and to Gaza municipality for their infrastructure. These crucial resources for maintaining life remain underfunded. Support BDS however you can against Carrefour, HP, Puma and Siemens. Share the following toolkit with your union and movement:
share this frequently, please. or include these into other compilations. these are crucial and don't get as much attention. these are resources that benefit everyone. Look for these resources in other websites with greater traction. Please do your best as you can.
hey btw to every Black transmasc who has reblogged this and said something to the effect of "hey this is me" in the tags. i love you. i can't describe the joy it makes me feel to read that. you are so fucking precious to me. please live. i love you. please be kind to yourself. i love you. i love you, i love you, i love you.
This comic is a little different than what I usually do but I worked real hard on it—Maybe I'll make more infographic stuff in the future this ended up being fun. Hope you learned something new :)
If you are still curious and want to learn more about OCD, you can visit the International OCD Foundation's website. I also recommend this amazing TED ED video "Starving The Monster", which was my first introduction to the disorder and this video by John Green about his own experience with OCD.
The IOCDF's website can also help you find support groups, therapy, and has lots of online guides and resources as well if you or a loved one is struggling with the disorder. It is very comprehensive!
Reblog to teach your followers about OCD
(But also not reblogging doesn't make you evil, silly goose)
You gotta be able to take an L if your moral and ethical belief systems are to be capable of guiding you. Otherwise you just have an idealized self where you get really mad and scared when anyone points out it isn't actually you. How the fuck are you gonna walk the walk if you can't handle being told when you are not, in fact, actually walking it
you cannot just socially transition into being a good person you are going to have to settle for being a messy human being who has to try and fail and keep trying to get better like everyone else. yeah even when it's embarassing and sucks for you a lot.
original image: four panel comic titled "Proximity" by @JNYMFG (op). Each is numbered in the corner, counting from 3 down to 0.
Panel #3 is yellow-toned, with an over-the-shoulder shot of a cheerful man reading the newspaper headline MORE WAR and thinking: "How awful... but I have my own problems!"
Panel #2 is orange-toned, showing a distraught woman reading the same headline, and thinking: "But my husband has family there!"
Panel #1 is red-toned, showing a pensive man reading the same headline, and thinking: "If I'd stayed, maybe I could have saved them."
Panel #0 is entirely blacked out.
reblog image: photo of poem titled The Diameter of the Bomb. Poem reads:
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective
range - about seven meters.
And in it four dead and eleven wounded.
And around them in a greater circle
of pain and time are scattered
two hospitals and one cemetery.
But the young woman who was
buried where she came from
over a hundred kilometers away
enlarges the circle greatly.
And the lone man who weeps over her death
in a far corner of a distant country
includes the whole world in the circle.
And I won't speak at all about the crying of orphans
that reaches to the seat of God
and from there onward, making
the circle without end and without God.
Yehuda Amichai (translated from the Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai & Ted Hughes) /end ID
When you get the reputation of being the guy with the encouraging words on New Year's Eve, it can start to come through as a little pressure -- what if the situation on the ground is worse than usual? what if people are more scared than they usually are, and with cause? what use are good vibes then?
well as you might imagine, because of the way I am hard wired, I think it's good and useful to figure out a way of imagining the light at the end of the tunnel
there's no tunnel, to be clear! nor light! these are metaphors! we could as easily say: the surface above the water; the doorknob in the darkness; the key at the bottom of the junk drawer; and so on, and so on
the use of these metaphors seems limited! strongly limited! when you get through tunnel to the light: what's out there? when you find the key in the drawer: do you actually want to open that door?
but for me this is fact where these ways of describing the world become more, not less, useful and instructive. questions, rightly posed, are about possibilities, not hard stops
"possibilities, not hard stops" -- this is one reason why a recent trend in interviewing on album cycles has been kind of mystifying to me: people will ask me to sort of summarize the song. but that's not how songs work! their job begins where the tidy explanation ends!
hence the occasional usefulness, I'm told, of the phrase "if it kills me" in a song I know people play on new year's eve, for which tradition I am so immensely grateful. Thank you.
it is a contradiction! make it through or get killed: these aren't compatible, are they? but yes in fact they are and we know they are. it's easy to forget but we know.
snakes leave behind whole skins. all manner of flying creatures, not just butterflies, do them one better, whole new selves from wriggling worms. rocks into gems. mystics die to the flesh to be reborn in the spirit. rebirth is the rule, not the stray exception, if we can grasp it
we in this country (and, I'd argue, the world, but I'm not here to argue tonight) are challenged to make of our present situation something better. it's a tall order
but look at yourself, consider your life
you have done it before, squared the smooth circle, navigated the hard corner, slipped through and lived to see another day
together? in solidarity? is there anything we can't do: for those suffering in an increasingly inhuman justice system; for our trans kin targeted by this wretched government; for immigrants scapegoated by the callous and the cruel? for, in and through all this, ourselves?
no tunnel but the tunnel whose contours we identify for the purposes of finding its exit, no light but the one we follow to better times
you are here at the end of a year in which I'll bet you wondered what the point was, at some point
the point is that together we can find a way. the point is that. together.
I wish you, and me, and all of us, strength & solidarity & joy in the new year as we find our way together: which we have done this year already, and will arise tomorrow to do again. /thread
My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too
They wrinkle like the river, sweeten like the dew
And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue
How can beauty that is living be anything but true?
Images: Sandra Lazzarini | _lasandra_ on IG
Lyrics: Incomprehensible by Big Thief
There's a lot of stuff that counts as dystopian about modern society, but one of the smaller yet insidious things I've noticed recently is the rise of companies whose entire marketing strategy is to convince you you're a burden to your friends and families.
I'm talking about that one dog watching/walking service that has a whole commercial implying that your family members secretly hate you for asking them to watch your dog to the point it counts as a modern social faux pas.
And there's this moving service commercial that I think someone else referenced in a big tweet that says something along the line of "Real adults don't ask their friends to help them move."
Like fuck that, man. You're supposed to want to watch your friends' pets, and you're supposed to want to help your friends move, and you're supposed to cook for people when they're sick, and you're supposed to show up to check on friends you haven't heard from in awhile, and you're supposed to remember your friend needs a large frying pan when you find one cheap at the thrift store and bring it to them.
One of the reasons the younger generations are so miserable and lonely is because the rise of technology and the concurrent pushing of this rhetoric that all effort is a major inconvenience, and asking someone to put in effort for you therefore makes you an inconvenience has conditioned them not to seek community.
And because they've never experienced it, they don't know that's what's missing. It's a vicious cycle because when you're depressed from lack of community, finding the energy to put in effort for other people is a lot harder than getting quick dopamine hits from scrolling on social media or watching Netflix. Then you encounter the further issue that our media glorifies romantic love to the exclusion of all else, so most of the young people I know who are lonely jump to "Well I just need a girlfriend/boyfriend/partner," and that sets up rough relationships because one person is expected to fill the void of a dozen or more friends and neighbors.
So please believe me: If you're lonely, try volunteering somewhere in the community. Try going to events around your interests. Try talking to local shop owners. Bake something and surprise a friend with it. Search for nearby clubs or intramural sports teams. There are companies literally capitalizing on subtlely encouraging you NOT to do these things. We've reached the point where helping your friend move is an anticapitalist act.
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